Moods of Manzanita - 5
Summer of '05 in Manzanita: July 20, at sunset (one night after the previous tour spot).
A full moon now looms over Manzanita, as the remnants of a sand castle sit in a mysterious glob near the surf.
Again, in spite of the day having been hot, the water was freezing.
At night, Neahkahnie Mt. is lit up by lamps, making it appear to (appropriately) float mysteriously in the sky. This from Beach Connection editor Andre' Hagestedt on the subject, coming in a future issue:
"These nocturnal moments on Manzanita beaches connect me to my other travels. I was born in Germany and still have many relatives there, so I’ve been back there numerous times. One of my most sparkling memories was of my grandmother’s town, Kolnau, in the Black Forest (and keep in mind, that region often resembles Oregon). There was an old castle ruin up on a vast hill overlooking her town and the neighboring one, called the Ruine Kastleberg. At night, it was lit up in a surreal manner, so that it looked like a giant ghost in the night sky (you couldn’t see the hills on which it was perched, so it appeared to simply hover there). Upon first viewing this at 10 years old, my childish imagination ran with this concept. I never forgot that fascination on subsequent visits.
In recent years, someone lit up parts of Neahkahnie Mountain, which overlooks Manzanita, in such a way. There’s a similar yellow lamplight cast upon the black basalt and yellow dirt walls of the mountain that hovers above the highway. The yellow cast, shapes and textures look much like that castle I remember from that small town in Germany. It makes part of the wall appear to float, almost ghostlike, above the sea – because you can’t really see much of the mountain shape at night.
It’s a double dose of hypnotizing surrealism for me, with its harkening back to poignant memories and its sense of the strange in real time."